By CLAUDIA ROWE, P-I REPORTER

Published 10:00 pm, Tuesday, April 15, 2008

It is audacious, almost unheard of and unlikely to succeed, yet sports and legal experts around the country said they will be watching with interest if Howard Schultz sues the new owners of the Sonics in an effort to force them to keep the basketball team in Seattle.

Despite its quixotic overtones, Schultz's expected attempt to prove that Clay Bennett and his partners acted in bad faith when they promised to try to keep the team in the Northwest could set up years of courtroom litigation -- less a legal slam dunk than an exhausting chess match.

"It's a long shot, practically speaking," said Mike Hunsinger, a lawyer with long experience representing Seattle sports interests. "But if I were advising Bennett, I'd be telling him to prepare for trial. I would think that Mr. Schultz will probably take this pretty seriously."

Typically, Hunsinger said, such suits are seen as an attempt to squeeze more dollars from a buyer, but Schultz will be asking for a judge to rescind the agreement itself -- meaning that nothing short of a complete reversal would satisfy his request for damages.

"That's what makes this potentially unique," Hunsinger said. "This is not a shakedown lawsuit."

A series of e-mails discovered last week appears to indicate that Bennett and his partners always intended to move the team out of Seattle, and that disclosure seems to be fueling Schultz's claim.

"There are many definitions of what constitutes good faith and bad faith, and this might be an important enough aspect to the court," said Timothy Davis, author of "Sports Law and Regulation" and a professor at Wake Forest University. "It's not as spurious as you might think."

From New York to the Northwest, attorneys agreed that such a finding might be grounds for breach of contract, though they differed in their opinions of an ultimate outcome.

"This is absolutely bizarre and almost certainly a loser," said Marc Edelman, who teaches sports law at New York Law School. "I would be shocked if any court would rescind a contract where there's been substantial performance -- in this case, payment -- for failing to perform a small condition, which is subject to many interpretations anyway."

Even if a judge entertained the case -- and then made the bold move to void Bennett's contract -- the NBA itself could foil Schultz's plan by refusing to take him back as an owner.

And Lester Munson, an attorney and legal analyst for the ESPN sports network, said that in two decades of studying sports and sports law, he had never seen a move quite like Schultz's.

Returning the team to Seattle would be "drastic, melodramatic and rare to the point of being nonexistent," Munson said.

Yet he was reluctant to outright dismiss the coffee entrepreneur and his high-flying legal team. In certain areas, he believes, Bennett may be vulnerable.

"The NBA, obviously, is a monopoly, so antitrust rules apply and that may give Schultz some leverage here," Munson said. "Sports leagues hate antitrust actions because they really are a monopoly, a cartel."

He added that Richard Yarmuth, the attorney representing Schultz, has significant experience litigating antitrust issues. "That gives them kind of a nuclear weapon if they can figure out how to make this into an antitrust case. And he's just the guy to do it."